Flags remain on the field

The dismissal of athletic director Bob Mulcahy must not write finis to the state's overdue examination of Rutgers' athletic policy in general and its football program in particular.

The question of who's ultimately responsible for a football program that seemed to spin out of control remains unanswered.

Indeed, a case can be made that Mulcahy was not the main problem at all in Rutgers' pell-mell pursuit of football prominence -- merely its principal instrument. Much remains unknown about just what authority the school administration and its board of governors granted Mulcahy, what its limits were and whether he exceeded them.

There's no uncertainty, however, about how much oversight the board and Richard McCormick, the school's president, brought to Mulchay's direction of the Rutgers athletic department -- little or none.

As disclosed in a series of reports by Star-Ledger staff reporters Ted Sherman and Josh Margolin, hundreds of thousands of dollars spent under Mulcahy were never listed in the Rutgers budget and secret contracts were signed that boosted compensation for football coach Greg Schiano. Millions more were poured into upgrading the school's sports facilities -- a lure to top athletes -- and to launch a $102 million expansion of the football stadium in hopes of boosting attendance.

As architect of a college football revival, Mulcahy has few peers. He took a program that hadn't played in a post-season bowl game in 129 years to four bowls and a rating among the top 20 teams in the country, even boosting the football team graduation rate along the way.

But the issue here isn't Mulcahy's success; it's the price that the Rutgers administration was willing to pay for his success -- the loss of transparency in its football funding operations, even the loss of other sports programs sacrificed to football. Mulcahy wiped out men's swimming, diving and tennis and lightweight and heavyweight crew to help pay for the football buildup.

The lure of football for a major college is understandable -- greater name recognition, enhanced alumni loyalty and contributions, even a spike in student applications. All desirable.

But if Rutgers' goal is to be more than a farm team for the National Football League and a Saturday television treat, it must strike a more careful balance between academics and football in how it spends its money.

The multimillion-dollar stadium expansion, for example, is over budget. How wise is that expenditure for a school dependent on funding from a cash-strapped state? Should all or most of that money have gone to the school's main mission -- academics?

Bob Mulcahy did his job, and well. But whether the Rutgers board and particularly McCormick, the chief advocate for the thousands of Rutgers students who don't play football, did their jobs remains in doubt.